Mordiceius’ Gaming Blog

After running Azjol’Nerub and The Old Kingdom last night, Rynala and I went over to Moa’ki Harbor to do the Tuskarr quests there. We only have about three quests left at the node but we’re already roughly 2500/21000 revered rep with them. Since we did both Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord, this gave us a nice boost in the rep. What shocked me is how easily the rep has been coming and how great the rewards are.

In WoW vanilla and The Burning Crusade, reputations weren’t something you worried about until the level cap. This made the items from the reps to be somewhat useless. When you hit level 70 in BC, most of your reps would be around 5000/12000 honored or so. One stark example of this is with the Consortium. They offer a level 62 dagger at honored rep. The problem with this is that by the time you hit honored, you’ll probably be in Nagrand and about level 66-67 and by then the dagger isn’t that great.

Now you contrast this with the Kalu’ak rep in WotLK. We’re already a good way into revered and we’re only 75. The only reward this faction offers at exalted is a new fishing pole and penguin pet so the good rewards come before that. At honored they offer eight different level 76 blue chestpieces for all the different classes and talent specs. At revered, they offer an assortment of level 78 blue weapons that are fantastic. Even though she’s not 78 yet, Rynala picked up the polearm because it is better than the one you get from the Amphitheater of Anguish (the new Ring of Blood). She didn’t pick up the chestpieces because she has one of similar quality already crafted from leatherworking.

Due to work and school, we haven’t been leveling the fastest, but I think us being at 75.5 after one week is not that bad for speed. We’ll most likely be 80 by the end of the weekend or the start of next week. The fact that we’ve been able to level our reps and professions up without any major distraction from leveling and get useful items from the reputations and professions that are good while leveling is a huge change and quite appreciated. Some people say that Blizzard is making the game too easy. Personally, I just think they’re fixing the game to the way it should have been from the very beginning.

I say that with the largest amount of sarcasm possible.

The amount of people looking for a faster way to hit 80 is just staggering. We’ve been given so much content in this expansion and all anyone ever wants to do is just blow through it as fast as possible. Case in point, the amount of traffic I received in the last week amazed me. Thousands of people looking to see between Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra, which one will get them to 80 faster.

What happened to just sitting back and enjoying the ride?

This guy is huge, as big as a gnome.

Anyway, I’m working on some blog posts for later.

Too busy to blog right now. Rynala and I are about halfway done with Borean Tundra. The amount of people looking for information about Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra still fascinates me. I had 1200 blog hits for from people searching “Howling Fjord vs Borean Tundra” yesterday and over 2200 already today. Incredible.

Anyway, why are you reading this?! Go play! I know I am. I’ll write more soon.

My last post on this subject, Howling Fjord vs Borean Tundra: Where Should You Start, has easily become my most popular post yet. Especially so with the expansion less than 48 hours away.

I figured since we are close to launch, I would take a look beyond Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra to the progression of the zones.

First of all, if you enjoy running a lot of instances or you are more casual and will always be leveling with rested experience, you can probably take two characters to level 80 without seeing the same zone twice. You could take the Howling Fjord path which would take you from Howling Fjord (68-72) to Grizzly Hills (73-75) to Zul’drak (74-77) to Storm Peaks (77-80). The Borean Tundra path would be from Borean Tundra (68-72) to The Dragonblight (71-74) to Sholazar Basin (75-78) to Icecrown Glacier (77-80).

The Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord Leveling Paths

A person that is going to speed level will not be able to do these paths. For me, my plan is to do Howling Fjord to Borean Tundra to Grizzly Hills to the Dragonblight to Zul’Drak to Sholazar to Storm Peaks to Icecrown doing instances whenever I can along the way. This is the path I took on beta and I hit 80 halfway through Zul’drak (though we had full rested always on beta). One thing from this route you may swap is Dragonblight and Grizzly Hills if you are leveling faster than everyone else. This is because I expect Dragonblight to infinitely more populated than Grizzly Hills and so if you’re moving faster than the masses, it’d be best to get it out of the way before they get there.

My Leveling Path

The two most populated zones for this expansion for leveling are going to be Borean Tundra due to the fact that both Stormwind and Orgrimmar lead there (compared to Undercity and Menethil Harbor for Howling Fjord) and the Dragonblight since it is a large zone with a huge amount of lore and events. Because of all this, you may consider trying to power through these zones if trying to beat the masses to 80. Grizzly Hills, Zul’drak and Sholazar will probably be pretty sparse in comparison.

If you have any questions, just leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them.

So the Lich King has begun his assault. Just barely more than 48 hours remain before the masses will be unleashed upon Northrend and the Lich King has started his assault with Orgrimmar.

MMO-Champion writes:

Sylvanas Windrunner and Garrosh Hellscream try to convince Thrall to send his forces to Northrend. Thrall doesn’t want to fall into a trap and get challenged by Hellscream in the Ring of Valor, Garrosh eventually wins and undead attack Orgrimmar shortly after. At the end of the fight Thrall finally agrees to send the horde to Northrend

The full dialog can be found here.

As for me, I haven’t been playing much WoW over the past couple days. My paladin has just been sitting for the most part. I’ve been questing for gold in the Netherstorm along with Rynala (my girlfriend’s hunter). We this week we did get to take her through Karazhan, Zul’aman, Gruul’s Lair and Magtheridon’s Lair. She just hit 70 about three weeks ago so she soaked up quite a few epics. She was lucky enough to get Attumens’ bow, then Prince’s bow then Zul’jin’s bow. Not only that, she’d been playing the Auction House so much that she already has her epic flying mount now.

Since she’s been working on a speech for one of her classes over the past couple days, I’ve been spending most of my time playing Fallout 3. It’s good and the combat is really fun. I wouldn’t say it is the messiah of games as I am getting REALLY tired of going through subway tunnel after subway tunnel. Other than that, the game is pretty solid.

The other game I’ve been playing is Wizard101. It’s basically Harry Potter meets Yu-gi-oh. It’s aimed towards kids though many adults enjoy it to. I got turned to this game from Hudson and Tipa. I’ll probably write up a full post on that tomorrow as I have the day off work.

This is part three of my “Dream MMO” series. You can find the first two parts here and here.

As for a class system, I look to three games as inspiration: World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online and the Elder Scrolls series (one of these things is not like the other, right? ;)). WoW and WAR handled the class system in similar ways with different small twists. WoW just copied the same classes for each faction (once they made the paladin/shaman change). This way each faction could feel perfectly equal from the class point of view, aside from the restrictions on classes based on race. WAR decided to pit specific races against each other and give each race four classes: a tank, a melee dps, a ranged dps and a healer. While not an exact copy, each class had a mirror class on the other faction, just with a different factional flair.

The Elder Scroll games are where I draw the biggest influence for what the classes would be like in Dawn of Steam. If you have never played and Elder Scrolls game (Morrowind and Oblivion being the biggest to date), while they have preset classes, each class is just a mixture of skill specialities and you can customize and create your own character class based on the specialities you want. Instead of having a list of hard coded classes, DoS would go somewhat off the Elder Scrolls model. There would be “suggested classes” for beginners, which would consist of about 5-10 different speciality combinations, but the more advanced players would probably want to just customize their classes. Each speciality would have it’s own flair based on the faction. For example in the case of a summoning specialty, Julians may summon a flying turret, Organics may summon a bird of prey, and the Synthetics may summon a flying aberration.

For a better explanation of how the system would work, I decided to write basic example of possible skills.

Each player is given 10 speciality points and 5 profession points when starting a character. The points can be spent towards:

Offensive Melee -
Daggers - Costs 2 Speciality Point - Daggers are aimed for quick decisive shots and give critical strike bonuses.
Blades - Costs 2 Speciality Point - Swords and axes. Slower than daggers but cause bleeds.
Blunt Weapons - Costs 2 Speciality Point - Maces and hammers. Slower than blades but can disorient opponents, reducing their casting and attacking efficiency.
Staves - Costs 1 Speciality Point - Staves are caster weapons and mainly stat grabs.
Hand to Hand - Costs 1 Speciality Point - Uses fist weapons for high damage combos.

Offensive Ranged -
Ranged Weapons - Cost 2 Specialty Point - The use of guns and bows. Weapons have different effects based on ammunition.
Shadow Magicks - Costs 2 Speciality Point - Shadow magicks consist of debuffs and damage over time abilities.
Elemental Magicks - Costs 2 Speciality Point - Elemental magicks is straight damage dealing abilities with fire, ice and air.
Conjuration Magicks - Costs 2 Speciality Point - Conjuring beings to fight along side you and allies.

Defensive -
Light Armor - Costs 1 Speciality Point - Light armor allows better movement. It has no penalties to casting or attacking.
Medium Armor - Costs 1 Speciality Point - Requires Light Armor - Reduces casting efficiency by 25%.
Heavy Armor - Costs 1 Speciality Point - Requires Medium Armor - Reduces casting efficiency by 50%.
Shields - Costs 1 Speciality Point - Allows use of shields. Gives ability to block attacks and threat increasing attacks.
Restorative Magicks - Costs 2 Speciality Point - Healing magicks. Can specialize in heals over time or direct heals.
Stealth - Costs 1 Speciality Point - Allows player to stealth. Cannot be done in very bright places. More effective at night. Also allows pick pocketing from NPCs and very limited pickpocketing from enemy players. Also has some special attacks that can only be executed with daggers. Cannot stealth in heavy armor.

Professions -
Alchemy - Costs 2 Profession Points - The making of potions and salves. Requires materials gathered from scavenging and herbalism.
Herbalism - Costs 1 Profession Point - The gathering of herbs and wood.
Armorsmith - Costs 2 Profession Points - The making of all types of armor. Can specialize in light, medium, or heavy.
Weaponsmith - Costs 2 Profession Points - The making of weapons. Can specialize in one type of weapon. Requires materials from mining and scavenging.
Mining - Costs 1 Profession Points - The process of gathering ore and gems.
Repairing - Costs 2 Profession Points - Repairing armor and weapons. Requires materials from mining, scavenging and a little herbalism.
Imbuing - Costs 2 Profession Points - Enchanting and dying gear. Requires materials from herbalism and scavenging.
Scavenging - Costs 1 Profession Points - Special looting options from humanoids and skinning options for beasts.
Tinkerer - Costs 2 Profession Points - The making of jewelery and other miscellaneous items. Requires materials from mining, herbalism and a little scavenging.

Now unlike the Elder Scrolls game, you do not get every skill specialty in the game with just bonuses to the ones you picked. Only the ones you picked you would get. Everyone would be allowed to where a basic cloth armor with very little stats/bonuses on it so that if they don’t pick up light armor, they’re not naked.

I haven’t quite decided if it would be better to just have the system that as soon as you start the game you have 100% proficiency in the specialty and you just gain new types of skills for each proficiency as you progressed in the game ala World of Warcraft or make it more Elder Scrolls style where you have to build proficiency in each speciality.

The game would have a couple preset classes. For instance it could have a preset paladin style class that was comprised of: Blunt Weapons, Blades, Light Armor, Medium Armor, Heavy Armor, Restorative Magicks, Shields, Armorsmith, Mining, Imbuing.

Anyway, that was a large messy stream of thought. In the next post I’ll explain the leveling and skill system.

And so the beta ended. Not with a bang, hell… not even with a whimper. It got quietly taken out to pasture in the middle of the night while the world slept.

There was no warning except for a blue post that came quickly, quietly and with little explaination:

We would like to thank everyone who has participated in the Wrath of the Lich King beta test. We greatly appreciate all of the feedback and you have given us during this critical phase of World of Warcraft’s development. In preparation for the launch of the game next Thursday, November 13, we will be bringing down our beta realms at 12:00 AM PST. Thanks again, and see you soon in Northrend!

I was somewhat disappointed by all this for a few reasons. I didn’t get to say goodbye to any of my beta guild mates or check out any of the final changes before closing. What depresses me the most about it all is that this means no end of beta event. No twelve hours of chaos and fun with GMs. I wonder if the GMs are disappointed about this as everyone else. Ah well, last night I took the opportunity to go buy Fallout 3. I only got to play about two hours of it before going to bed, but I am expecting that this game will probably consume most of my free time until Wrath of the Lich King hits.

Tomorrow is the big day so I figured I’d write up a small political post. Everything I could ever imagine saying has already been said by people who are much better writers than me. So please read what Scott Jennings and Michael Zenke have to say on this.

Me? I have already voted for Senator Barack Obama, but I will leave you all with a little something from Wil Wheaton’s blog: